Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species

Just 150 years ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vastly off the mark. And what we believed to be the history of our own species consisted of fantastic myths and fairy tales; fossils, known for millennia, were seen as the bones of dragons and other imagined creatures. How did we learn so much so quickly? Remarkable Creatures celebrates the pioneers who replaced our fancies with the even more remarkable real story of how our world evolved.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom

For over a century, opening the black box of embryonic development was the holy grail of biology. Evo Devo--Evolutionary Developmental Biology--is the new science that has finally cracked open the box. Within the pages of his rich and riveting book, Sean B. Carroll explains how we are discovering that complex life is ironically much simpler than anyone ever expected.

Living History: Experiencing Great Events of the Ancient and Medieval Worlds

These 24 dramatic lectures examine key events from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome to medieval Europe and Asia. Spanning thousands of years and three continents, this course illuminates fascinating historical dramas on the individual scale.

Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

No subject is bigger than reality itself, and nothing is more challenging to understand, since what counts as reality is undergoing continual revision and has been for centuries. The quest to pin down what's real and what's illusory is both philosophical and scientific, a metaphysical search for ultimate reality that goes back to the ancient Greeks. For the last 400 years, this search has been increasingly guided by scientists, who create theories and test them in order to define and redefine reality.

From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

Time moves forward, not backward---everyone knows you can't unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today's hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too. In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions before the Big Bang itself---a period of modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed.

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries, from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato's Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world--they did not understand what there is to understand or how to understand it.

Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature

Spectacular fossil finds make today's headlines; new technology unlocks secrets of skeletons unearthed 100 years ago. Still, evolution is often poorly represented by the media and misunderstood by the public. A potent antidote to pseudoscience, Written in Stone is an engrossing history of evolutionary discovery for anyone who has marveled at the variety and richness of life.

Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

Where does DNA come from? What is consciousness? How did the eye evolve? Drawing on a treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, Nick Lane expertly reconstructs evolution's history by describing its 10 greatest inventions - from sex and warmth to death - resulting in a stunning account of nature's ingenuity.

The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution

DNA is the genetic material that defines us as individuals. Over the last two decades, it has emerged as a powerful tool for solving crimes and determining guilt and innocence. But, very recently, an important new aspect of DNA has been revealed: it contains a detailed record of evolution. That is, DNA is a living chronicle of how the marvelous creatures that inhabit our planet have adapted to its many environments, from the freezing waters of the Antarctic to the lush canopy of the rain forest.

The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World

Imagine running a business without a strategy. It would be akin to driving blindfolded, to building a house without a blueprint. The concept of strategy changed all that, paving the way for the creation of the modern corporate world. The Lords of Strategy provides listeners with a deeper understanding of the world they compete in, and a sharper eye for what works — and what doesn’t — when forging strategy.

On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical, and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Historian and philosopher Richard Carrier reexamines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct.

The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: The Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the Earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?

Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future

Donald R. Prothero explains the scientific process and why society has come to rely on science not only to provide a better life but also to reach verifiable truths no other method can obtain. He describes how major scientific ideas that are accepted by the entire scientific community (evolution, anthropogenic global warming, vaccination, the HIV cause of AIDS, and others) have been attacked with totally unscientific arguments and methods.

Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself

Where did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must I die? Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological problem: How can something as large and complex as a human body organize itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg?

Why Evolution Is True

Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design", there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned: the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection.

Basin and Range: Annals of the Former World, Book 1

To geologists, rocks are beautiful, roadcuts are windowpanes, and the earth is alive, a work in progress. The cataclysmic movement that gives birth to mountains and oceans is ongoing and can still be seen at certain places on our planet. One of these is the Basin and Range region centered in Nevada and Utah.

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

Monster of God

For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of our existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above - so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Named one of "The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War" by the Times Literary Supplement, and one of the "100 Best Nonfiction" books by the Modern Library, Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a landmark of scientific thought. Written in 1962, Kuhn's book took an entirely different view of how scientists perceived and achieved changes in basic theoretical assumptions - what he termed "paradigm shifts".

The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity

Physicists have been exploring, debating, and questioning the general theory of relativity ever since Albert Einstein first presented itin 1915. Their work has uncovered a number of the universe's more surprising secrets, and many believe further wonders remain hidden within the theory's tangle of equations, waiting to be exposed. In this sweeping narrative of science and culture, astrophysicist Pedro Ferreira brings general relativity to life through the story of the brilliant physicists, mathematicians, and astronomers who have taken up its challenge.

The Origin and Evolution of Earth: From the Big Bang to the Future of Human Existence

This course chronicles the history of Earth and life on Earth from the point of view of the minerals that made it all happen. A major theme is how minerals and life coevolved, leading to the unprecedented mineral diversity on our world compared to the other planets in the solar system. Professor Hazen tells this epic story in 48 action-packed lectures that take you from the big bang to the formation of the solar system to the major milestones that marked the evolution of Earth and life.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution.

The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being "animal" and started being "human". In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion.

Publisher's Summary

Just 150 years ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vastly off the mark. And what we believed to be the history of our own species consisted of fantastic myths and fairy tales; fossils, known for millennia, were seen as the bones of dragons and other imagined creatures. How did we learn so much so quickly?

Remarkable Creatures celebrates the pioneers who replaced our fancies with the even more remarkable real story of how our world evolved. Inspired by Humboldt, the first group we meet - Darwin, Wallace, and Bates - returned from their explorations with the makings of the theory of evolution. The second group undertook expeditions that produced some of the most spectacular finds in paleontology: Eugene Dubois uncovered Java Man, the first claimed missing link between apes and humans; Charles Walcott located pre-Cambrian life in the Grand Canyon and Cambrian life in the Burgess Shale; and Roy Chapman Andrews unearthed dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert of Mongolia. The discovery of the kinship of dinosaurs and birds and the emergence of the "fishapod" formed more links in the evolutionary chain, as did the work of Louis and Mary Leakey, who for five decades searched for our deepest past in East Africa.

The final section of the book moves into the laboratory and the future, following the trailblazers who discovered a time clock in our DNA and extracted ancient DNA from extinct species.

Join Carroll and his cast of naturalists for a rousing voyage through the most dramatic adventures and important discoveries in two centuries of natural history.

I am a professional science writer; I love science and have learned a great deal about evolutionary biology and the history of that field. But Sean Carroll's "Remarkable Creatures" brought me back to the first-taste delight and gratitude I felt 25 years ago when I began reading the classic books in this subject. Bravo!
Anyone who loves science will fall in love with this book. Anyone who loves biographies will love this book. Anyone who loves great storytelling and adventure tales will love this book. More, I can think of no more pleasant and powerful way for anyone to truly grasp the power and beauty of the scientific endeavor as the most trustworthy way of knowing. In these stories of the great discoveries that birthed and honed an understanding of evolution and the deep-time frame that it requires, one comes to viscerally understand why the openness of science to new ideas (the liberal side of science) is necessarily tempered by the skepticism of those who have a stake in then-current understandings (the conservative side of science). Both are essential. This book gives the listener a profound appreciation of both.
Finally, the author's choice of precisely what biographical elements to convey is masterful. Of note was his choice of including a vignette from each discoverer's childhood that would play out during the course of the narrative as pivotal for shaping his or her character, persistence, or field of interest. The importance of mentors was also very clear in these stories. How crucial to offer up such opportunities to questing youth in every generation!
Overall, I give this book my highest recommendation.

I wonder why the author didn't read this himself. The narrator makes these tales sound like a text book with one declarative sentence after another, droning on and on and on. Carroll, whom I greatly admire, is a scientist, not a writer, and that shows in some places, but his enthusiasm for the subject matter would have brought these amazing stories to life much better than Jim Bond. I don't expect sing-song, but I do want a hint of enthusiasm in the reader's voice!! I doubt if many could stick with this all the way through with this narrator.
Publishers: don't be terrified to have authors and women narrators. You seem to think the only acceptable narrator must have a DEEP monotone. Not true!

Basically a riveting collection of the "greatest hits of biology, paleontology, geology, etc. The author doesn't take himself too seriously and offers up one great story after another: Darwin, Wallace, Bates, Leakey, Chapman, Alvarez.

If you are an evolutionist like myself you will find this book very entertaining and informative, lots of background information I did not know. It's a kind of adventure story of the histories of some early naturalists, evolutionary theorists, and geologists. Also the narration is perfect and never gets in the way of the story.

Where does Remarkable Creatures rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The best book I have listened to on audible so far!

Any additional comments?

This book truly captures the way that science works in lay terms and is a great combination of History, Geology, and Biology with a special emphasis on the plight of every new scientific discovery. I could have listened to this book in one sitting. It is a must read, seriously buy this one if you are on the fence.

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